Apr 9, 2017

John Zammito: A Philosophical Reconstruction of the Sublime

Its a review made by Zammito about the Robert Doran's book, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant.

Robert Doran claims that the sublime is all about transcendence
transferred from the religious to the aesthetic domain of experience.
Taken in this philosophical rather than stylistic sense, it proved
crucial for the development of modern subjectivity. Doran traces the
issue from Longinus through the decisive reception of Nicolas Boileau,
who first distinguished le sublime from le style sublime, on to an
extended engagement with Immanuel Kant. In all this he seeks its place
in the rise of the modern bourgeois subject. The social-historical
connections tend to be a bit overstated, first, with regard to Boileau
and the idea of the honnête homme, and especially with the claim that
“Burke treats aesthetic concepts as proxies for sociopolitical
categories.” It is not fruitful for an understanding of Kant, either.
This weakens his powerful argument for the philosophical significance of
the sublime in modern thought.